The top selling cars under the microscope - fuel economy

This Olympic season we were all introduced to something new. This year’s Olympic medal table got looked at through many new lenses, including medals per head of population, medals per funding dollar and so on. This got us thinking; perhaps we should take a deeper look at the usual top selling vehicles with a little more depth? With this in mind we decided to take the top 30 selling vehicles and make a list of the 10 least fuel efficient of the bunch.

The list rules

Using combined litres per 100km (LP 100km), petrol only, figures from https://www.greenvehicleguide.gov.au/ we created the list of the least fuel efficient cars in the top 30 selling vehicles for August of 2012. In the case of a tie (which there was for 10th place) the “urban” fuel consumption is taken into account. Additionally, only the worst offending of each model will be shown. In the table below we also have a column which tells you how many other model variants are above the 10.6 litres per 100km it takes to get into the top ten. Simply put this means, in the case of the Ford Falcon for example, that there are 24 other types of Falcon which have a fuel economy of 10.6 litres per 100km or more.

Find out more

Find out more

Final thoughts

Ok, so not everyone who buys a Nissan Navara or a Toyota Hilux is buying the least fuel efficient vehicle in the model range. In this respect the research is not perfect. Indeed there are many very fuel efficient versions of the models above, I would even go further and say that massive strides have been made in the past few years. Be this as it may the fact still remains that there are almost 70 model variants with a fuel economy of 10.6 litres per 100km in the top 30 vehicles alone. This figure is likely to change in the coming months and years ahead as demand for the petrol hungry vehicles continues its decline.